'For me the sketches I produce now and then are shortish or longish chapters of a novel. The novel I am constanly writing is always the same one, and it might be described as a variously sliced-up or torn-apart book of myself.? One of the great writers of the twentieth century - and an important influence on Kafka - comes to light in this selection of the best of his short fictions. Through his protagonists - young men of modest means, famous artists, society women, animals endowed with the gift of speech - Robert Walser captures the dislocated unease of life in early twentieth-century Europe.